My Real Life

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Joachim Sauer has maintained a remarkably low public profile throughout his decades-long marriage to Angela Merkel. Now he speaks in detail about his own life for the first time. "My Real Life" traces his journey from childhood in East Germany through his scientific work in Berlin-Adlershof to the years following the fall of the Wall and into the Berlin Republic.

When the Wall fell, Sauer was forty years old. He had spent nearly half his life under SED dictatorship. In his autobiography, he recalls his origins and education, the beginning of his research career as a quantum chemist, the pressure to conform, pragmatic compromises, and personal boundaries. He describes party loyalty alongside the room for maneuver, the everyday reality of a scientific world that thought internationally in professional matters yet remained politically controlled, and the transformation that began in 1989/90.

The book draws its power from an unusual perspective. Sauer speaks as a scientist who devoted his life to research, and simultaneously as someone who witnessed his wife's political rise from the closest vantage point.

In Hamburg, Joachim Sauer discusses the chapters of his autobiography, the influences and turning points that shaped him, and humor as a form of distance.